Mike Flanagan has made some of the best horror movies and TV shows of the past decade, but in order to do so, the filmmaker has had to live through some dark times himself. The writer/director behind projects like Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House and one of the upcoming Stephen King movies, The Life Of Chuck, shared the reason why his work has changed tone from his early “very bleak” movies.
Flanagan recently caught up with Katee Sackhoff, whom he worked with on his second feature film, 2013’s Oculus. During the conversation, Sackhoff got candid about being “really concerned” about playing a mother who tries to murder her children due to how dark the material was. Amidst the discussion, Flanagan shared how he looks at his early work differently these days.
It's funny on the other side of parenthood looking at a at a story like [Oculus] because that that's something else that struck me watching that movie was I didn't have experience as a parent when I was writing that and looking at it now that's also from a time where a lot of the stuff that I was writing had really bleak endings yeah and very hopeless endings and it pivots right after that and and kind of everything I've done since then doesn't have that.
As Mike Flanagan shared while on The Sackhoff Show, he sees how grim a movie like Oculus is, and now that he’s a parent, he perhaps would not have written the same movie. As the filmmaker, who recently signed on to make the next Exorcist movie spoke to, the tone of his writing in the horror space changed a lot when he married his wife Kate Siegel and started a family with her. As he continued:
I think in a lot of ways it is [because of Kate Seigel] and it's because of family. You know when Kate and I got together my outlook changed a lot and as you know we had kids of our own and the kids started growing up. It started to become more important for me because someday they're going to interrogate our work, right? Like someday we're going to be gone and if they want to revisit us in an interesting way they have all this work that they can look at and I never wanted them to come revisit those things and be left on a note of hopelessness. And so, it's become incredibly important to me that no matter how dark a story gets there's always hope and forgiveness and empathy at the end to the point that I'll get some complaints in reviews and stuff about things like ‘Oh, but then he pulled the punch [and it had a] happy ending.’ It's like no, this is more important than that.
If you’re a fan of Flanagan’s work, you know Kate Siegel as one of the most popular repeating actors in his projects over the years. Mike Flanagan is currently six years sober, but prior to that, as the filmmaker openly spoke about in the podcast, he was in a “depressive state” that even he wasn’t conscious of. He recalls that he would often self medicate with booze and place a lot of his value on being successful in Hollywood. He also said this:
I always used to think like ‘Oh, if I can get stability in my career then I can achieve stability in my relationships’ and it was kind of the other way around. It was when your relationship is stable or when you're in the right relationship everything else around it tends to stabilize or you don't mind so much the other instability you know? Your priorities change.
While Mike Flanagan knows that he has been criticized for going down a more hopeful route in his works since being a husband and a father, it’s more important for him to make the kind of work his kids can be proud of. That can certainly be noticed in The Fall Of The House Of Usher, which recently became our favorite new horror series and joins some of his best movies and TV shows across his career.
Next up, Flanagan has The Life Of Chuck premiering this fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, and his Exorcist movie slated among upcoming horror movies for March 2026!
